Need some help with scan-to-mesh

m.bevers
Advocate

Need some help with scan-to-mesh

m.bevers
Advocate
Advocate

In short: What steps do I need to follow, to load a Recap generated mesh into Navisworks Manage?

 

 

What I did so far:

  • I used the scan-to-mesh function in Recap Pro, to convert a relatively small (3GB) point cloud, into a mesh.
  • I used these settings:

mbevers_0-1646222748112.png

 

  • I saw the uploading and conversion progress bar and it gave me the "action completed" prompt once it was done and I also see that 3 cloud credits were removed from my account
  • On my Autodesk Drive I now see these two files:

mbevers_1-1646223039466.png

(To my surprise, these files are only 20mb in size, is that normal for a 3GB point cloud?)

 

 

I also tried converting the OBJ file to FBX, using one of those free online converter websites. But when I load (or append) that converted FBX into Navisworks, I don't see anything.

I have no clue what to do with the .rcm file either.

 

Any help on how to get from here, to viewing the mesh in Navisworks, would be highly appreciated.

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barmanr
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi @m.bevers ,

 

You can open the RCM mesh file in ReCap Photo that comes along with ReCap Pro. After loading the RCM file you can export it to FBX, OBJ, and other formats. Do note this way: No coordinate system info will be transferred on export.

 

Or you can directly append the OBJ in Navisworks Manage and it will show up.

 

Regarding the file size, it actually depends on how elongated your scene is actually. Even if you used a 3GB file but the bounding box is very long and wide. You will get a mesh that is lower in size and reduced in details. To get higher details, the workflow is to crop the point cloud to a smaller area and then run Scan to mesh to get more definition and details.

 

You can first open the RCM in ReCap Photo to analyze your mesh and also do clean-ups.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Warmest Regards,



Rishov Barman
Reality Capture
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m.bevers
Advocate
Advocate

Thanks for the response @barmanr 

 

Are there any plans to increase the scan-to-mesh output formats to (at least) .fbx?

 

I noticed that somehow Recap Photo hasn't been installed on my pc, although I do have Recap Pro. So I contacted our IT department for that.

 

On the matter of file size:

This is a screenshot of the scan that I used for the scan-to-mesh test.

mbevers_0-1646294882361.png

(as said, this scan contains about 3GB of .rcs files)

 

And as you can see, the main area is rather small building (13x10x5 meters), with some clutter scan outside.

 

I didn't use the crop function, as I was under the impression that the complete scan is already very small. Are you suggesting that I should even crop this (already very small) point cloud?

 

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barmanr
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi @m.bevers ,

 

Sorry for the late reply. Been a little occupied.

 

From your image, I can see that, there are points lingering even beyond your area of focus. The engine will consider them as well. It would be best to either use the limit box in ReCap to contain the point cloud only to the small room area or delete the outlier points altogether.

 

For fbx support, the reason we actually did not include it was because it was failing for large meshes of sizes 3GB onwards. Something to do with fbx format for large sizes. We are working on an NWD mesh format for Navisworks that hopefully, we can dish out in a future update or so. No ETA on it yet. With NWD the mesh can be loaded onto Navisworks to output an FBX.

 

Warmest Regards,



Rishov Barman
Reality Capture
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kannabiran.s
Explorer
Explorer

Using Scan to mesh feature, the output is solid model?

I suppose to share the brownfield model to vendor but due to huge size of scan i cant. will this feature help me?

 

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barmanr
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi @kannabiran.s ,

 

Yes, Scan to Mesh will generate a solid mesh that will be of much lighter weight. Note: The scan-to-mesh cloud processing will require tokens. The generated output formats will be NWC, OBJ, and RCM.

 

Recently we also released a Beta whereby you can run Scan to Mesh locally (no tokens required) on your machine. More details here: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/recap-forum/recap-2025-2-beta-participation/td-p/13073809

 

Thanking You.

 

Warmest Regards,

 

 



Rishov Barman
Reality Capture
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